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Back in 1986, the magazine Newsweek had an alarming cover story. Entitled "Too late for Prince Charming" it claimed that "40-year-old women are more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than to marry.

That terrorist factoid made its way into our popular culture, such as the 1993 romantic comedy, Sleepless in Seattle. This statement made for fabulous headlines, but even way back then, that statistic was wrong.

The data was massaged from the study called Marriage Patterns in the United States. It was carried out by Yale sociologists Neil Bennett and Patricia Craig, and Harvard economist, David E. Bloom.

Its main area of study was the large difference in marriage rates between blacks and whites. There was a minor examination of the marriage rates of various sub-groups.

The study then made predictions, for example, that university-educated white women who were not married by the age of 40 had only a 2.6% chance of ever getting married.

Yale University's Neil Bennett casually mentioned this last prediction to a reporter for the Stamford (Connecticut) Advocate newspaper, who slapped it on the front page.

On March 31, 1986, People magazine had the cover with four Hollywood actresses in their 30s, under the headline "Are These Old Maids?"

In San Francisco, a Newsweek correspondent, Pamela Abramson, casually jotted down the "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" phrase in an internal memo.

In New York, Eloise Solholz, the writer of the Newsweek cover story, saw this phrase and added it to the story.

She said, in the 2006 follow-up to the 1986 story that "it was never meant to be taken literally". So that's how the famous "terrorist-marriage" factoid hit the newsstands.

There are several problems with this "terrorist" factoid drawn from the original Yale-Harvard study.

First, that 2.6% chance of getting married is much much much greater than the chance of being killed by a terrorist. In the USA since 1960, you're just as likely to be killed by a deer as by a terrorist.

And even taking into account the 9-11 attacks, the lifetime risk for an American citizen to be killed by a terrorist is about one in 500,000, which is a lot longer odds than 2.6% (which is about one in 40).

Second, the Yale-Harvard study used the wrong mathematical model to make predictions.

Even worse, it used only a small sample provided by a 1982 Mid-Census survey. Indeed, the sample was so small that one of their sub-classes (university-educated black women) had only 100 members.

So when Jeanne Moorman, a demographic statistician at the US Bureau of Census used a more appropriate mathematical model to make predictions, and the much larger sample size of the huge 1980 US Census, she worked out that about 23% of white University-educated single women aged 40 would marry by the age of 65 — very different from 2.6% of women consigned to the shelf by the Yale-Harvard study.

Third, the Yale-Harvard study did not take into account the very rapid changes experienced by women in recent times.

Just one century ago, most women in developed countries had no birth control, no vote, no property, no access to higher education and no protection from physical abuse.

By about half-a-century ago, around 1960, half of all American women were married by the age of 20.

But over the next few decades, from 1970 to 1985, there was an increase of over 1000% in cases of men and women living together without children, or of 213% of living together with children.

And today, women no longer have to get their social or economic status from their husbands.

So this reduced pressure to marry an older, wealthier man means that some women are perfectly happy to marry a younger male, such as a starving artist.

And there are now extra factors that affect marriage rates. These include the many couples who prefer to shack up together without marrying, the women who are single mothers by choice, the single women who are perfectly happy to be single and who don't want to be married, and the openly declared gay women.

That original 1986 Newsweek article looked at 14 single women. In a 2006 follow-up, about three quarters of the original 14 were married.

Those now-married women might find their hearts racing — but from the love of a decent fella, not the fear of a fanatical attacker.